Behind the
decipherment of ancient inscriptions lies a tradition of some one
hundred and fifty years. The two momentous triumphs in this field are
linked with the names of Georg Friedrich Grotefend, the brilliant German
schoolmaster, and Jean-Francois Champollion, the child prodigy who at
sixteen already knew eight languages. In both cases one element in the
script was already known. For Grotefend, who deciphered the cuneiform
script, this element was admittedly pure hypothesis at first (his
assumption that certain signs represented three known names of Persian
kings), but it proved to be correct at the very first test, and the way
was then open for further deciphering. For Champollion, the unraveller
of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the known element was contained in a
readable Greek text. On the trilingual Rosetta Stone, Champollion
identified the name of Ptolemy, mentioned in the Greek text, with a
group of hieroglyphic signs that were emphasised by being framed in a
ring, and thus he determined the first few letters-the basis for further
interpretation. From Champollion's day on, however, a text in two
languages - what archaeologists call a bilingual - has remained the
dream of all philologists when confronted with newly discovered scripts.
Rarely has such a dream been so beautifully fulfilled as it had been for
Champollion. On the other hand, such staggering luck is no longer
necessary-techniques have been refined greatly in the past century.
Insignificant hints which would have meant nothing to the pioneers of
deciphering now furnish vital information. And with each new
decipherment has come a growth in understanding of the network of
interrelationships linking the ancient languages with one another. It is
curious that the most important of these networks among ancient
languages was detected long before the first decipherments, in the year
1786, to be precise. And it was discovered not in the traditional
centres of Near Eastern studies - England and Germany - but in India.
The man with phenomenal linguistic gifts who first perceived this
critical system of interrelationships, and thereby made the most
fruitful discovery in the history of philology, was at the time Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of judicature in Calcutta. In his leisure
hours he was concerned not so much with comparing languages, as with
collecting and translating Hindu and Mohammedan legal lore.

Hisname
was William Jones; he was born in London in1746. He studied
ancient languages and history at Harrow, and specialised in Persian,
Arabic, and Hebrew. It was probably his transfer to India that
stimulated him to study Sanskrit, the Hindu language of literature and
scholarship. As he worked with Sanskrit, he perceived in the languages
he knew a concealed skeleton. Behind the individual features of numerous
languages he discerned their true face, their family resemblance. The
busy colonial magistrate had no time to work out his discovery in
detail. But there were others to build on the basis of his ideas.

Franz Bopp, a
German linguist (1791-1867), proved conclusively that there existed a
group of languages which, because they included the languages of India,
central and western Asia, and most of Europe, could be called
'Indo-European' - languages bearing astonishing resemblances to one
another invocabulary and form, and which were therefore related.

Naturally the
first reward of the early Indo-European philologists was mockery. It
seemed on the face of it ridiculous to claim kinship between Afghan and
Icelandic, Sanskrit and Russian, Frisian and the language of the
Gypsies, or Latin and Old Prussian. After all, the geographic area
supposedly covered by this linguistic group ranged from India over the
Near East to the westernmost point of Europe. It was an area broken by
deserts, mountains, and seas, populated by widely differing races.

The Indo-European philologist
is still confronted by a great many problems. For example the 'original
home' of this linguistic group has by no means been definitively
established -it isnow held to have been somewhere between
southern Russia and central Europe. But the basic fact of its group
existence, of close and more binding kinships among the members of the
group as against other language groups of the white race
(Hamito-Semitic, Caucasian, Dravidian, and the isolated Basque
language), is no longer open to doubt.

In addition to the tried and
tested methods which had led to the decipherment of dead languages and
scripts throughout the nineteenth century, Indo-European philology now
contributed a new key with which to unlock the enigma of the Hittite
clay tablets from Boghazkoy. Oddly enough, the man who first used this
key was not an Indo-European philologist. He was an Assyriologist -
linguistically speaking, a student of the Semitic group of languages,
for Babylonian Assyrian is reckoned among the East Semitic tongues.

After
Winckler's death, the German Orient Society of Berlin had handed over
the collection of Hittite cuneiform material from Boghazkoy to a group
of young Assyriologists, in order that they might arrange and transcribe
it. From the start there were two diametrically opposite personalities
in this group: the rather ponderous, grave German Ernst F. Weidner, and
the lively, gifted Czech Friedrich (or Bedrich) Hrozny - born in Poland
in 1879.

When the First
World War broke out, the Germans promptly put such useless creatures as
students of ancient languages into uniform. Weidner, a great hulk of a
man, was assigned to the Heavy Artillery. While he was slowly working
his way up to the rank of corporal, his rival Hrozny fell into a feather
bed. Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, he found a tolerant
superior in Lieutenant Kammergruber, an easy-going Viennese who took a
liking to the young professor and who, as far as lay within his powers,
gave Hrozny the freedom to pursue his researches. Hrozny gratefully
acknowledged that his first paper, 'The Solution of the Hittite
Problem', was only given its definitive form during the author's
military service'. In fact he tells us that his second paper was
also completed during this period. When we consider that these articles
were far from easy to write, that they represented scientific pioneering
of the highest type, we can well imagine that the thirty-five-year-old
scholar's military service was not especially burdensome. He was even
given the opportunity to spend weeks in Constantinople examining
cuneiform Hittite material which at that time was scarcely accessible to
any other European scholar.

But we
certainly do not want to imply that Weidner, sweating over his cannon,
might have, but for that, outstripped the more fortunate Czech -
especially since we know now that Weidner was on the wrong track. And it
would be foolish to maintain that Hrozny deciphered the Hittite language
solely because he had more time at his disposal than his rival. Hrozny
was a man who had already done a great deal in his field; at the age of
twenty-four he had participated in excavations in northern Palestine and
had published highly esteemed reports on cuneiform texts, while at the
age of twenty-six he had been appointed to a professorship in Vienna.

So it is
evident that Hrozny tackled his task equipped with phenomenal knowledge.
He was also blessed with enormous scientific audacity. His approach was
altogether unbiased; he did not want to let the suggestions of others
predetermine his conclusions and was thoroughly prepared to be surprised
himself. He would work directly from the evidence, even if his
observations should contradict all the established views.

We know on his
own testimony that at the beginning of his labours he had not the
faintest idea what kind of language would be revealed to him.

Again and again
in the history of such discoveries as Hroznys there comes a climax at
which the innumerable false starts and fresh insights, the endless
patient labour of formulating, comparing, and rejecting, culminate in a
single idea which proves to be the crucial one. And this idea, the fruit
of so much toll and searching, is as a rule strikingly simple.

The starting
point of Hroznys work was the usual determination of proper names.
The second point was the perception that the Hittitetexts
contained what were called ideograms'.

The
Babylonian-Assyrian cuneiform writing in the Boghazkiy texts had in its
earliest form (like all other scripts) been picturewriting which later
developed into a syllabic script. A large number of the earlier pictures
had been retained in this syllabic script. Such ideograms had been taken
over by the Hittites and could be read by scholars of cuneiform
writing - that is, they could be understood without knowledge of the
language.

An example will
make the matter clear. As readers of English alone, we can see the
numeral 10 in an English, German, and French text and understand
it immediately. The fact that a Frenchman may call this figure dix and a
German zehn in no way affects our understanding.

In this
fashion, with the aid of ideograms, Hrozny read the words 'fish and
father'. And then, in the course of wearisome examination of the
closest details, he groped his way forward from word to word, from form
to form-until one day he discovered (simply by changes in the form of
words and despite the fact that he could not yet arrive at the meaning
of a single sentence) that Hittite displayed grammatical forms typical
of the Indo-European linguistic group. In particular he recognised a
participial form.

This discovery
was extremely confusing. There already existed a large number of
theories about the Hittite language. But with the exception of a single
scholar, who afterwards recanted, it had occurred to no one that Hittite
might be an Indo-European language. There was no objective basis for
this idea, for to assume that Indo-Europeans had been dominant in inner
Anatolia in the middle of the second millennium BC was to contradict all
that historians of the Near East had learned.

No wonder,
then, that Hrozny was wary of this conclusion. It looked to him as
though he was being deceived by accidents of language. But as he worked
on, he was reluctantly forced to note more indications pointing to the
membership of Hittite in the Indo-European family of languages.

But
then came
the day when Hrozny, setting over a certain text, took a deep breath
and, conscious of the boldness of his own thesis dared to think: 'If I
am right about the interpretation of this line. there is going to be a
scientific storm. But the sentence he was reading seemed clear and
unambiguous. He had only one choice: to say what it was he saw - even if
it overturned the views of all specialists in ancient history.

The text which
led Hrozny to this resolve was the sentence nuninda~an
ezzatteni vadar-ma ekutteni.

In this
sentence there was only a single known word: ninda. It could be
deduced from the Sumerian ideogram that this word meant 'bread'.

Hrozny
said to
himself. 'A sentence in which the word bread is used may very well
(though it need not necessarily, of course!) contain the word
"eat".' Since at this point the indications that Hittite might
be an Indo-European language were already becoming overwhelming, he drew
up a list of various Indo-European words for eat'. Was it possible
that he was dealing here with a Hittite cognate? English 'eat' was in
Latin edo, in Old High German ... As soon as Hrozny wrote down
the Old High German word he knew that he was on the right track. Ezzan
certainly bore a strong resemblance to the Hittite ezzatteni.

The next
significant word, which seemed to cry out for such cornparisons, was
undoubtedly the Hittite vadar. Since it occurred in the same line
as 'bread' and 'eat', it might very well be related to food. Hrozny, a
veritable bloodhound on the trail of an Indo-European language, saw a
similarity to the English water, German Wasser, Old Saxon watar.
We need not go into the complicated grammatical considerations which
led him to an interpretation of the Hittite sentence, but at this point
he ventured a translation: 'Now you will eat bread, further you will
drink water.'

Such a reading
of the sentence was an amazing confirmation of the idea which had been
suggested as early as 1902 by the Norwegian orientalist Knudtzon, whose
theory, however, had been greeted with such universal scorn by the other
experts that he had retracted it. Hittite after all was an Indo-European
language!

Further
conclusions followed. Since the archaeologists were able to establish
the period at which the Boghazkoy texts originated as the fourteenth and
thirteenth centuries B C, and since there were indications that many
texts were copies of much older documents, some of perhaps the
eighteenth century B C , Hrozny could lay claim to having deciphered
possibly the oldest Indo-European language. His texts compared in
age with the oldest parts of the Rig-Veda, the Hindu scriptures, which
had begun to take shape in India around the middle of the second
millennium BC.On 24November
1915Hrozny delivered a lecture on his decipherment to the
members of the Near Eastern Society of Berlin. The following month this
lecture was printed. But his book on the actual decipherment itself was
first published in Leipzig in 1917. It was entitled The Language of
the Hittites; Its Structure and Its Membership in theIndo-European
Linguistic Family. The first sentences of the preface stated:

The present
work undertakes to establish the nature and structure of the hitherto
mysterious language of the Hittites, and to decipher this language ...
It will be shown that Hittite is in the main an Indo-European language.'

In the 246
pages of his book, Hrozny presented the most complete decipherment of a
dead language that had ever been given to the public. Hardly any of his
statements were hypothetical or provisional; he presented definitive
conclusions.

The excavator
who finds golden treasure and the mummies of long dead kings is not the
only one who experiences that moment of illumination when he seems to
lay his hand on the very past. The same thrill can come to a man sitting
bent over books in his study, pondering a single sentence, until
suddenly he feels that shudder of awe which voices from immemorial tombs
evoke. There is more to such a matter than dry philology. For does not
'water', uttered as a cry in a desert landscape, mean parching thirst? Vadar,
water, Wasser-how staggering it isto realise that with three
thousand years intervening, a Frisian living on the North Sea coast of
Germany and a Pennsylvania Dutchman of eastern North America would
understand a Hittite's cry of thirst!

The bronze tablet found at Boghazkoy in 1986, the
finest surviving Hittite cuneiform inscription.

Pecularity of the Hittite method of
writing may be mentioned here, namely "alography", the
practice of writing a different word from that which was actually
pronounced. Hittite texts are liberally interspersed with purely
Akkadian and Sumerian words, the latter usually written by single signs,
the use of which as "ideograms" can often be recognised only
by means of context, for they maybe the same signs that are normally
used for mere syllables. But these "foreign" words were
probably not pronounced in reading; they merely conceal the
corresponding Hittite word, which the reader was expected to substitute
for them . This was undoubtedly intended as a kind of shorthand by the
scribes.

.

Hittite gold dish decorated with a wild cattle hunt.

The name "Hittite" was given to
this language by modern scholars as being the official language of the
Land of Hatti, and has been universally accepted; but it is strictly
speaking incorrect. For the word hatilli - properly, 'in
Hittite' - is used in the texts to introduce passages in a totally
different language. When this was discovered, scholars searched the texts
for the true name of the official language. It is now generally agreed
that the true name of the language is "Nesite" or "Nesian",
the language of Nesa or Kanesh, but despite this the name
"Hittite" is now so well established that it will probably never
be abandoned.